Cisco, EMC, VMware Team Up on Networking, Cloud Training

By CIOinsight |
Posted 04-05-2012

Cisco Systems is once again teaming up with EMC and VMware, this time to offer IT professionals technical training in a wide range of areas impacting the data center, from networking and cloud computing to storage and virtualization.

The joint educational effort, announced April 2, comes at a time when technology trends, including cloud computing, big data and converged infrastructures, are significantly changing the way enterprise IT professionals run their data centers. Cisco, EMC and VMware are looking to give IT administrators the needed training to address these trends, according to Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, vice president and general manager of Learning@Cisco.

"Today's data center is composed of heterogeneous technologies, with the cloud blurring the lines between technology silos," Beliveau-Dunn said in a statement. "IT organizations must cultivate new cloud architecture skills, understand how to use big data and maintain deep domain expertise with a renewed understanding of virtualization and technology convergence. With this offering, Cisco and EMC are leading the way in transforming skills for the next generation of IT professionals."

Those new skills will grow in importance as big data, unified networking, cloud computing and converged infrastructures transform not only what systems and technologies are put into the data center, but also the expertise IT administrators need to install, deploy and manage these environments.

With their joint education programs, Cisco, EMC and VMware will offer training and certifications that officials said will give tech professionals the skills to build and run these evolving data centers and leverage the benefits that the current computing trends offer.

"Our solutions will provide organizations, as well as the IT professional, a prescriptive and simple way to acquire the right skills at the right time, regardless of where they are in their journey to cloud computing, addressing big data or employing a data science strategy," Tom Clancy, vice president of EMC Education Services, said in a statement.

The companies will create what officials call learning paths that will enable IT managers to get the training they need for their particular environments. They include paths for systems administrators and data center network architects. Courses will touch on Cisco-based data centers, EMC cloud infrastructures and services, data science and big data analytics.

Cisco, EMC and VMware--of which EMC owns a majority--have been strong partners for several years, most significantly in creating Cisco's Unified Computing System. The UCS is a converged data center solution that includes not only Cisco server and networking products, but also EMC storage and VMware virtualization technologies.

The UCS, launched in 2009, has been a fast-selling product for Cisco, with more than 11,000 customers worldwide after three years on the market.

The companies later in 2009 created VCE, a joint venture designed to build integrated hardware and software platforms called Vblocks that leverage technologies from all three vendors.